In the Realm of the Senses
In the Realm of the Senses is a 1976 film from France and Japan, directed by Nagisa Ōshima, running 105 minutes. reelscum files it under sexploitation and transgressive & midnight.
- Year
- 1976 · 1970s films
- Runtime
- 105 min
- Director
- Nagisa Ōshima
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- canon (10/100)
- Also known as
- In the Realm of the Senses
Defined in the glossary: Sexploitation, Transgressive & midnight
The art film that shipped its own negatives abroad to beat Japan's censors. Unsimulated, and deadly serious about it.
Nagisa Oshima took the 1936 Sada Abe case, a maid who strangled her lover mid-embrace and then carried his severed genitals around Tokyo, and filmed it with the sex unsimulated and the obsession played dead straight. To get it made he ran it as a French co-production and shipped the undeveloped negative to Paris, because doing any of this in a Japanese lab would have been a crime, and customs officers around the world seized it anyway. The two lovers wall themselves into a room and turn a love affair into a closed loop that can only end one way, and Oshima frames the escalation as tragedy rather than titillation. It is explicit to a degree almost nothing since has matched, and entirely humourless about it. The one time hardcore was pointed at something and hit it.
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